Fachbereich Mathematik

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This work aims at including nonlinear elastic shell models in a multibody framework. We focus our attention to Kirchhoff-Love shells and explore the benefits of an isogeometric approach, the latest development in finite element methods, within a multibody system. Isogeometric analysis extends isoparametric finite elements to more general functions such as B-Splines and Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) and works on exact geometry representations even at the coarsest level of discretizations. Using NURBS as basis functions, high regularity requirements of the shell model, which are difficult to achieve with standard finite elements, are easily fulfilled. A particular advantage is the promise of simplifying the mesh generation step, and mesh refinement is easily performed by eliminating the need for communication with the geometry representation in a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) tool.
Quite often the domain consists of several patches where each patch is parametrized by means of NURBS, and these patches are then glued together by means of continuity conditions. Although the techniques known from domain decomposition can be carried over to this situation, the analysis of shell structures is substantially more involved as additional angle preservation constraints between the patches might arise. In this work, we address this issue in the stationary and transient case and make use of the analogy to constrained mechanical systems with joints and springs as interconnection elements. Starting point of our work is the bending strip method which is a penalty approach that adds extra stiffness to the interface between adjacent patches and which is found to lead to a so-called stiff mechanical system that might suffer from ill-conditioning and severe stepsize restrictions during time integration. As a remedy, an alternative formulation is developed that improves the condition number of the system and removes the penalty parameter dependence. Moreover, we study another alternative formulation with continuity constraints applied to triples of control points at the interface. The approach presented here to tackle stiff systems is quite general and can be applied to all penalty problems fulfilling some regularity requirements.
The numerical examples demonstrate an impressive convergence behavior of the isogeometric approach even for a coarse mesh, while offering substantial savings with respect to the number of degrees of freedom. We show a comparison between the different multipatch approaches and observe that the alternative formulations are well conditioned, independent of any penalty parameter and give the correct results. We also present a technique to couple the isogeometric shells with multibody systems using a pointwise interaction.